Vancouver has experienced a 717% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, reflecting a legacy of discrimination in a country seen as welcoming of newcomers
Steven Ngo had stopped at a traffic light in a residential neighbourhood in the eastern part of Vancouver when passengers in another car tossed garbage at him, shouting racial slurs as they sped off.
The lawyer, a lifelong resident of the city, was stunned – but not surprised.
Continue reading...Two years after Ronald Greene, a 49-year-old Black man, died after a confrontation with white police officers in May 2019, the Louisiana police department released footage of the incident.
Louisiana state police had refused to publicly release footage from the incident, which they claimed culminated in Greene dying from crashing into a tree and injuring his head.
Continue reading...The killing of Floyd by a white officer reflected a common history of violence against Black people that united protesters in a renewed global movement
George Floyd’s murder felt like everything was the same and nothing was the same, said Miski Noor, an activist in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed by a white police officer a year ago on 25 May.
“How many times have we seen Black death go viral?” asked Noor, the co-founder of Black Visions, which advocates for abolition, an approach to public safety that does not involve the police.
Continue reading...Exclusive: commission’s finding follows number of protests over colonial legacy at Oriel College
A independent commission set up to examine the future of Oxford University’s controversial statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes has recommended its removal.
The commission was set up last June after Oxford University’s Oriel College voted in favour of removing its statue. The commission was asked to look into the issue after a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was torn down in Bristol at the height of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protest.
Continue reading...A report, which included testimonials, found that 52% of Black shoppers would stop frequenting a store after being profiled
In a new survey, more than 90% of African American shoppers said they had experienced racial profiling while buying or browsing – a phenomenon sometimes known as “shopping while Black”.
The State of Racial Profiling in American Retail report, carried out by DealAid, surveyed 1,020 consumers who identified as Black or African American.
Continue reading...President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will mark the killings of 303 Chinese people during the revolution that the city of Torreón has tried to forget
The first to die were Chinese agricultural workers, who were killed in the orchards and gardens surrounding the Mexican city of Torreón by advancing revolutionary forces in the early hours of 13 May 1911.
After skirmishes at the outskirts of the city, the outnumbered federal garrison abandoned their positions and slipped away under the cover of darkness.
Continue reading...The actor Lakeith Stanfield has spoken out amid controversy over his presence in a Clubhouse room where participants made antisemitic remarks, saying: “Any kind of hate speech, I vehemently reject.”
Related: Lakeith Stanfield: ‘I don’t hold anything back’
Continue reading...Amnesty International says private military firm in Cabo Delgado abandoned others to their fate
Survivors of a recent attack by Islamist insurgents in Mozambique have told Amnesty International that private military contractors prioritised white workers for evacuation as the extremists closed in during days of confused fighting.
An estimated 220 civilians sought refuge in the Amarula hotel in Palma, in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, during the attack in late March.
Continue reading...From running to the shops in Jamaica to wrapping himself in the Union Jack, the Olympian has had phenomenal highs and bruising lows. He looks back on an extraordinary life in athletics
Linford Christie’s Olympic training unwittingly began many years before he began to take over the world, 100 metres at a time. As a child, he spent seven formative years in Jamaica’s most populous parish, St Andrew, where his grandmother, Anita, would send him off to the shops with a cunning technique to ensure that he came back promptly. “She’d spit on the floor and say: ‘Don’t let it dry before you come back,’” laughs Christie over Zoom. “She was most probably my first coach.” Christie has no recollection of ever getting in trouble upon his return, an indication that even in those days he ran like the wind.
What he does remember is the warmth of life in Jamaica. The family home seemed to be vast, filled with sisters, his brother, cousins and aunties. The community was so tight that if he got up to any mischief, family friends would not hesitate to keep him in check. In Jamaica, his grandmother was in charge. “Growing up, she was everything,” he says. “She was the mother, the doctor, the dentist; you name it, my grandma covered it.”
Continue reading...Occasion overshadowed by disclosure that bones of children who died held for almost four decades by University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia on Thursday marks the city’s first official day of remembrance for the 1985 bombing of a Black liberation group in which 11 people, including five children, were killed and an entire African American neighborhood burned to ashes.
Related: Ivy League colleges apologize for ‘serious error’ in using bones of Black child for teaching
Continue reading...Boris Palmer posted comment online about former footballer Dennis Aogo
The leadership of Germany’s high-flying Green party is facing the first test of its authority ahead of national elections in September, after a prominent Green mayor posted a racial slur about a German national footballer on social media.
Regional leaders of the party voted at the weekend to expel Boris Palmer, the provocative mayor of Tübingen, over a Facebook post in which he referred to the former Germany international Dennis Aogo as an “awful racist”, in reference to an unsubstantiated anecdote on social media that the footballer, who has a Nigerian father and a German mother, had once bragged about the size of his penis, using the n-word.
Continue reading...The Moonlight director on how making his epic TV adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning The Underground Railroad compelled him to fully confront the history of slavery, as well as his own damaged childhood
Barry Jenkins first heard the history of the Underground Railroad from a teacher when he was six or seven years old. The school lesson described the loose network of safe houses and abolitionists that helped enslaved people in the American south escape to free states in the north in the 19th century. Jenkins as a wide-eyed kid imagined an actual railroad, though, secret steam trains thundering under America, built by black superheroes in the dead of night. It was an image, he recalls, that made “anything feel possible”. “My grandfather was a longshoreman,” he says. “He came home every day, in his hard hat and his tool belt, and his thick boots. And I thought, ‘Oh, yes, people like my granddad, they built this underground railroad!’”
That childhood image returned to Jenkins, now 41, when he read an advance copy of Colson Whitehead’s novel about that history, which builds on that same seductive idea. That was in 2016. Both Jenkins and Whitehead were on the edge of career-defining breakthroughs: Jenkins’s film Moonlight was about to be released (and would go on to win the Oscar for best picture) and Whitehead’s book The Underground Railroad was about to be published (going on to receive the National Book Award and the Pulitzer prize). All this was to come, though, when the pair met. “I was familiar with Colson as an author,” Jenkins told me last week on a screen from his home in Los Angeles. “And once I read his book, I knew for sure I absolutely want this. And I’m not that guy. Usually I’ll read something and I go, well, that might make a great film, and then I’ll just leave it. But this one, it’s all hands on deck, we have to get this.”
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China
Continue reading...Jerry Lawson led the invention of cartridges, Ed Smith made a hybrid console/PC, and designer Muriel Tramis won France’s highest honour for bringing history into play. How many more names are forgotten?
In the 1970s, in the fledgling days of the video games industry, an engineer named Gerald “Jerry” Lawson designed one of the earliest game consoles, the Channel F, and also led the team that invented the game cartridge, a defining innovation in how games were made and sold. His son, Andersen Lawson, recalls that he was often working on gaming projects in the garage of their family home in Santa Clara, California. “There have been conversations recently about the struggles he might have had that were related to his colour,” he says. “Was it difficult [for him]? Yes, I’m quite certain. But I never heard any grumblings from him. And I’m also certain that he earned his respect … My father was a person of colour and I think that would inspire young people today to jump in and help move the industry along.”
Black people, and especially black women, are still underrepresented in the video games industry. The Independent Game Developers’ Association records that only 2% of US game developers identify as black; in the UK, meanwhile, according to UKIE’s 2020 census of the entire industry, 10% of its workers are black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME). But black innovators such as Jerry Lawson have been present and influential since the earliest days of the video games industry – and there is not enough recognition for their achievements.
Continue reading...Police recorded almost 24,000 far-right crimes last year – the highest level since records began
Germany’s interior minister has said that a dramatic rise in rightwing extremist crime demonstrates a “brutalisation” of society and poses the biggest threat to the country’s stability.
Horst Seehofer said politically motivated crime in general was a growing problem, pledging more police surveillance of protest groups as a result.
Continue reading...Being urged to retouch then re-retouch the singer’s photo left Justine Cullen shaken. In this extract from her new book she recalls the ‘cookie cutter’ cycle her industry was trapped in
I stood and knocked tentatively on my publisher’s office door, holding a printout of my latest cover gingerly in my fingertips. The cover I held in my sweaty hands this time was Beyoncé, and she looked … well, she looked like Beyoncé. She looked perfect.
The publisher held the cover in her hands and looked at it approvingly. “It’s wonderful,” she said, nodding. I gave a relieved little sigh and turned to leave the room. But, just as I got to the door, she glanced back up from her computer screen and piped up, nonchalantly, as though having an afterthought: “Are you going to make her skin a little lighter?”
Continue reading...In her early days with the girl band, Pinnock felt invisible and couldn’t understand why. Then the role of race became clear
Leigh-Anne Pinnock has been living the pop star dream ever since she was 19 and stepped on to a stage to audition for The X Factor, singing Rihanna’s Only Girl (In the World). She has now spent almost a decade in one of the UK’s biggest girl groups. But she had a difficult start with Little Mix, and not because she didn’t get on with her bandmates. She felt “invisible”, and would regularly cry in front of her manager. “I just couldn’t seem to find my place, and didn’t know why,” she said in a magazine interview in 2018. “I didn’t feel like I had as many fans as the other girls. It was a strange feeling.” She had, at that point, finally realised what the trouble was. “I know there are girls of colour out there who have felt the same as me,” she said. “We have a massive problem with racism, which is built into our society.”
If she expected the interview to change anything, she was disappointed. “I really did feel as if it fell on closed ears,” she says today, speaking from the Surrey mansion she shares with her footballer fiance, Andre Gray. “It was almost like people just weren’t ready to talk about race then.”
Continue reading...A New Jersey high school teacher was suspended with pay for making profanity-laced comments to students about George Floyd.
Related: Teargas, flash-bangs: the devastating toll of police tactics on Minnesota children
Continue reading...Prof David Richardson cites systemic issues that disproportionately affect black and minority ethnic students
UK universities are institutionally racist and must do more to support students of colour, a leading vice-chancellor has said.
Prof David Richardson, chair of Universities UK’s advisory group on stamping out racial harassment on campuses and vice-chancellor of University of East Anglia, said there was evidence of systemic issues that disproportionally affect students from black and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds.
Continue reading...Against a backdrop of Covid, a striking number of musicians, from hard rock to jazz, made music rich with positivity. In the first of a two-part series, they tell their stories
I had really given up on music after my mom passed away [in 2014], and then of course the record that I saw as my death rattle [2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet] got picked up in a big way. It was a very bittersweet moment where all these great things were happening in the wake of loss. I didn’t allow myself to feel that for a long time. Now I feel ready to embrace feeling.
Continue reading...